All this swept like lightning through his head.
Porfiry Petrovich was back in an instant. He suddenly became somehow merry.
“Since your party yesterday, brother, my head...in fact, the whole of me is somehow unscrewed,” he began in quite a different tone, laughing, to Razumikhin.
“Well, was it interesting? I left you yesterday at the most interesting point. Who won?”
“No one, naturally. We got on to the eternal questions, and it all stayed in the clouds.”
“Just imagine what they got on to yesterday, Rodya: is there such a thing as crime, or not? He said they all lied themselves into the blue devils.”
“What's so surprising? It's an ordinary social question,” Raskolnikov replied distractedly.
“The question was not formulated that way,” Porfiry observed.
“Not quite that way, it's true,” Razumikhin agreed at once, hurrying and getting excited as usual. “You see, Rodion—listen and give your opinion, I want it. I was turning inside out yesterday waiting for you; I told them about you, too, that you were going to come...It started with the views of the socialists. Their views are well known: crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social set-up— that alone and nothing more, no other causes are admitted—but nothing! . . .”
“Now, that is a lie!” cried Porfiry Petrovich. He was growing visibly animated and laughing all the while, looking at Razumikhin, which fired him up all the more.
“N-nothing is admitted!” Razumikhin interrupted hotly. “I'm not lying! ... I'll show you their books: with them one is always a 'victim of the environment'—and nothing else! Their favorite phrase! Hence directly that if society itself is normally set up, all crimes will at once disappear, because there will be no reason for protesting and everyone will instantly become righteous. Nature isn't taken into account, nature is driven out, nature is not supposed to be! With them it's not mankind developing all along in a historical, livingway that will finally turn by itself into a normal society, but, on the contrary, a social system, coming out of some mathematical head, will at once organize the whole of mankind and instantly make it righteous and sinless, sooner than any living process, without any historical and living way! That's why they have such an instinctive dislike of history: 'there's nothing in it but outrage and stupidity'—and everything is explained by stupidity alone! That's why they so dislike the livingprocess of life: there's no need for the living soul!The living soul will demand life, the living soul won't listen to mechanics, the living soul is suspicious, the living soul is retrograde! While here, though there may be a whiff of carrion, and it may all be made out of rubber—still it's not alive, still it has no will, still it's slavish, it won't rebel! And it turns out in the end that they've reduced everything to mere brickwork and the layout of corridors and rooms in a phalanstery! [75] The phalanstery may be all ready, but your nature isn't ready for the phalanstery, it wants life, it hasn't completed the life process yet, it's too soon for the cemetery! You can't overleap nature with logic alone! Logic will presuppose three cases, when there are a million of them! Cut away the whole million, and reduce everything to the one question of comfort! The easiest solution to the problem! Enticingly clear, and there's no need to think! Above all, there's no need to think! The whole of life's mystery can fit on two printed pages!”
“He's broken loose again, drumming away! You've got to hold him by both arms,” Porfiry laughed. “Imagine,” he turned to Raskolnikov, “it was the same yesterday evening, with six voices, in one room, and with preliminary punch-drinking besides—can you picture that? No, brother, you're lying: 'environment' means a great deal in crime; I can confirm that.”
“I know it means a great deal, but tell me this: a forty-year-old man dishonors a girl of ten—was it the environment that made him do it?”
“Well, strictly speaking, perhaps it is the environment,” Porfiry observed with surprising solemnity. “The crime against the girl may very well be explained by the 'environment.’”
Razumikhin all but flew into a rage.
“And if you like I can deducefor you right now,” he bellowed, “that you have white eyelashes solely because Ivan the Great [76] is two hundred and fifty feet high, and I can deduce it clearly, precisely, progressively, and even with a liberal tinge. I can! Want to bet?”
“I accept! Let's listen, please, to how he deduces it!”
“Ah, he just goes on pretending, devil take it!” Razumikhin cried out, jumped up, and waved his arm. “You're not worth talking to! He does it all on purpose, you don't know him yet, Rodion! And he took their side yesterday just so as to fool them all. And, Lord, the things he was saying! And didn't he make them happy! ... He sometimes keeps it up like that for two weeks. Last year he assured us, who knows why, that he was going to become a monk: he stood by it for two months! Recently he decided to assure us he was getting married and that everything was set for the wedding. He even had a new suit made. We already started congratulating him. There was no bride, nothing— it was all a mirage!”
“Ah, that's a lie! I had the suit made before. It was because of the new suit that it occurred to me to pull your legs.”
“Are you really such a dissembler?” Raskolnikov asked casually.
“And did you think I wasn't? Just wait, I'll take you in, too—ha, ha, ha! No, you see, I'll tell you the whole truth! Speaking of all these questions, crimes, the environment, little girls, I now recall, though it always interested me, a certain article of yours: 'On Crime'...or whatever it was, I don't remember the title, I've forgotten. I had the pleasure of reading it two months ago in Periodical Discourse.“
“My article? In Periodical Discourse?”Raskolnikov asked in surprise. “I did indeed write an article dealing with a certain book six months ago, when I left the university, but at the time I took it to Weekly Discourse,not Periodical.“
“Yet it got into Periodical Discourse.“
“But Weekly Discourseceased to exist, which is why it wasn't printed then . . .”
“That's true, sir; and as it was ceasing to exist, Weekly Discoursemerged with Periodical Discourse,and so your little article appeared two months ago in Periodical Discourse.And you didn't know?”
75
The term "phalanstery" was coined by the French Utopian socialist thinker Charles Fourier (1772-1837) to designate the physical and productive arrangements for living in the future communal society. Dostoevsky's interest in "Fourierism" as a young man led to his arrest by the tsar's agents in 1849.